Garden of Earthly Dreams

When I was pregnant with Badb, my husband and I didn't want to know in advance what gender the baby would be, so we had to pick out both boy and girl names. We started out with Celeste and Julian. I wanted the boy's middle name to be Fox, and my husband didn't like Celeste as a first name. We settled on Athena Celeste for a girl, but hadn't quite fixed on a boy's name until well into my seventh month when I decided that it would be Hieronymus Fox. I can tell you two things: the first is that I have never seen a single episode of Buck Rogers and would have been mortified to know that I would be naming my child after a television character played by Gary Coleman. Luckily, I didn't find this out until well after my child's birth. Second, every single person I knew, without exception, expressed a fervent hope that my child would be a girl. Nobody liked the name Hieronymus but me.

Of course the most well known Hieronymus is Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the famous tryptich The Garden of Earthly Delights. I myself probably own three or four copies of the painting in one form or another. Maybe I like Bosch because I feel a kindred spirit. His visions and my dreams agree in startling ways.

Last night, my husband and I were at something that used to be a high school. It was no longer used for such, but it was a public space now. We were hanging out by the lockers with about half a dozen other people wearing jeans and t-shirts and carrying manga comics. Everyone had wild, stand-up hair and their clothes and accessories were festooned with likenesses of animated characters.

My husband and his friends were deeply involved in watching the most recent installment of some favorite show, and one of our other friends leaned over and asked me if I'd like to go for a ride. I said I would, and we ended up seated on what looked like a giant cafeteria tray. We gently lowered ourselves into a rushing river...of pasta sauce. It was at least twenty yards wide, and although it bubbled and swirled around our tray, it wasn't hot. All I could think every time our little craft took on "water" and we were splashed was that I would have some intense stain removal to do later.

We came around a tiny isthmus - a little peninsula that held a children's playground, but the players weren't children. They were all animals dressed as children. Two things in rompers with pterodactyl-looking heads hung from the jungle gym as something that looked like the living version of the Montauk Monster walked underneath. The Montauk Monster looked like a large cat with white fur over very red skin and a beak that made it look like an Egyptian carving. The pterodactyl-heads were grabbing at it, biting at it with their larger, more ferocious-looking beaks while the monster stalked by unconcerned.

The playground was bordered by a cinderblock fence, and there was a javelina wearing overalls and a striped shirt somehow pinned to the fence a foot or two above the ground. It was squealing in distress, clawing at the wall with its hooves, rubbing itself bloody against the rough cinderblocks. My skin crawled at the sight of the suffering beast, but the current was taking us away from the scene.

When I woke up, I was thinking about my daughter. I don't think that it would have been so bad if she'd been a boy and have been named for the Dutch painter, who himself was named for Saint Jerome. But instead, she is named after the goddess of wisdom, and is living up to that promise instead. I can only hope that when she gets home, she'll have something wise to say about my dreams.